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THE JOURNEY

1

Mary Waabooz, lovingly known as Old Mary to her friends and relatives, the oldest member of the Rama Indian Reserve, had died, and the people crowded into her modest house late in the evening were singing the reassuring old gospel hymns in the language of their ancestors. The light of a solitary coal-oil lamp at the head of the open coffin threw a shadow down over her body, softening the gaunt features of her face, making her look decades younger and bringing a look of peace to someone who had spent the last weeks of her life in agony. It did the same for the other old people in the room, ironing out the creases on their foreheads, erasing the wrinkles on their dark brown, leathery cheeks, and concealing the slack flesh on their necks. There was a smell of decay mixed with sweetgrass in the room. The mood was one of calm and acceptance. There was no weeping. Old Mary had outlived three husbands and two grown children and her time had come. And yet her death still hurt. It was like an ancient tree, a landmark in the history of the community, unexpectedly crashing to the ground, leaving a massive empty space in the lives of the people.

Jacob Musquedo, his hair as black as ever despite his sixty-seven years, sat quietly near the door, anxious to leave. Stella, who had grown into a massive middle-aged woman of some two hundred and fifty pounds and who had prepared the body for burial earlier in the day, stared morosely at the flame of the lamp. Only Oscar, now thirteen years old, his hair pulled back and twisted into one thick black braid and with black watchful eyes set in his dark, high-cheek-boned face, sang along with the others. He was there mainly because he wanted to be close to his mother whom he loved but who did not love him. He was also there because he had been a friend of Old Mary and had often gone to her house on winter evenings to eat hot fried bannock, to drink tea with sugar and condensed milk, and to listen to her talk about the world of her youth.

“When I was a little girl,” she used to say, “we believed in Giche Manitou, the Creator, and not in the God of the Christians. We believed in Madji Manitou, the evil spirit, and not in the devil of the Christians. We believed that all things, animals, stones, water, and everything visible and invisible possessed souls, just as humans did. We believed that a monstrous seven-headed serpent with eyes the size of dinner plates inhabited the lakes of the Chippewa homeland in Muskoka. We believed that Mother Earth was Turtle Island and that it had come into being from a grain of sand carried by a muskrat to the surface of the sea without beginning or end. We believed that the Milky Way was the handle of a bucket holding up Turtle Island. We believed that the first humans emerged from the dead bodies of animals and were first cousins of the animals.”

Oscar always felt a tremor of fear run down his spine when Old Mary’s eyes began to glisten and she went on to tell tales of witches, shape-shifting bearwalkers, cannibalistic Windigos, and other evil beings that owed their allegiance to Madji Manitou and who roamed the Earth doing harm to humans. He much preferred her accounts of the battles his people had fought over the years. He became a war chief when they drove the invading Iroquois from their hunting grounds; he became Pontiac when Chippewa warriors captured British fort after British fort at the end of the Seven Years’ War; he was at the side of his great-grandfather fighting the Americans in the War of 1812; and he was with his father and grandfather fighting the Germans in the Great War. In every one of these engagements, he saw himself as the hero battling impossible odds to impress his mother and gain her admiration and affection.

At eleven-thirty, Jacob signalled to Oscar that it was time to depart, and grandfather and grandson went around the room, taking their leave of the mourners sitting in chairs pushed back against the walls. But Stella, when they came to her, refused to take their outstretched hands and looked away. They murmured their goodbyes anyway and went quietly to the door, picked up their packs, left the property, and started down the gravel road to the railway station.

Suddenly, a half-dozen dogs burst out into the starlight from behind a house and ran barking toward them, but they fled whimpering back into the darkness when Jacob picked up a rock and hurled it in their direction. His seasonal job as a handyman at the McCrum and Son Guest House at the Muskoka village of Port Carling, close to his summer home at the Indian Camp, started the next morning at eight o’clock. He and Oscar needed to catch the midnight train to Muskoka Wharf Station at Gravenhurst at the bottom of Lake Muskoka and paddle throughout the night if he was to report for work on time. James McCrum, the proprietor, wouldn’t care whether or not there was a death in the family or a pack of dogs blocking his way and would probably fire him if he was late.

Thirty minutes later, they smelled the creosote of railway ties and off in the distance heard the shriek of a steam whistle. Quickening their pace, they reached the station just before the locomotive, shaking the rails and pulling two dozen passenger and freight cars, its headlight cutting a path through the night, came thundering around the curve of Lake Couchiching. It had left Toronto four hours earlier and was on time.

With a hiss of air brakes, a cloud of coal smoke, grease, and soot, the train came to a jerking stop. The door at the rear of a coach opened and the conductor, a lantern in his hand, peered out into the gloom in search of passengers. He kicked down the stairs when he saw Jacob and Oscar standing on the platform.

“Tickets, please,” he said, when they came aboard, holding out his hand to take and punch them. “It’s dark in here,” he whispered as he lighted the way with his lantern and led them into an overheated coach filled with sleeping passengers and reeking of sweat, stale food, and cigarette smoke. Coming to two empty places, he said, “These should suit you fellows. Stow your gear on the racks above your heads. You’ll be getting off at the next stop.”

Oscar took the seat closest to the window and sat silently in his separate world as the locomotive, panting with enormous gasps of steam like some primeval dragon preparing for combat, its driving rods pounding and its giant wheels straining as they turned, pulled out of the station. Scraping a peephole in the frost covering the inside of the window, Oscar looked out at the starlit countryside as the train picked up speed and hastened forward at sixty miles an hour. He thought back to the wake, to the single mesmerizing coal-oil lamp casting its soft light over Old Mary’s body and the elders in the room who had seen and done so much in their long lives.

What had the old people been thinking? Were they recalling the days when Old Mary was young and they were young? Remembering the days when the families had returned from their winter hunting and trapping grounds in the spring to spend the summers together at the Narrows where Lake Simcoe emptied into Lake Couchiching? The days when they would talk about births and deaths and finding the perfect person to marry? The days when the ancestors undertook spirit quests, when they gathered sweetgrass for ceremonies, and when they held community feasts? Or, as they looked at Old Mary in her plain pine coffin, were they mourning the loss of their youth and counting the days until his mother appeared at their homes to wash their dead bodies and put them on display in plain pine coffins in their living rooms?

And what meaning did Old Mary’s death have for him, for Oscar Wolf, his head pressed against the window staring out through the opening in the frost as the train raced through railway crossings empty of traffic, its wheels clicking ever more rapidly on the rails, and its whistle wailing? He was sad because Old Mary had been his friend and was now no more. But at the same time, for some unexplainable reason, her death made him feel more alive than ever and astonished at the wonder of existence.

“You owe your birth to blind luck,” Jacob once told him when he was a little boy, “since your parents knew each other for only two weeks before your father went overseas and was killed.”

Oscar at first had accepted his grandfather’s judgement, but as he grew older and started to think for himself, he came to the conclusion that luck had nothing to do with it. Divine Providence was the cause. In contrast to Old Mary, perhaps because he regularly attended church, he believed in the Christian God as well as the Native Creator and felt their presence when he said his prayers before he went to bed and at church during Sunday services. They had put him on Mother Earth for a purpose, he was sure. And although that purpose would only be revealed in the fullness of time, he liked to think he was destined to do great things for his people someday. Maybe he would be a great warrior like Tecumseh, who rallied Indian warriors from across Canada and the United States to save Canada from the Americans in the War of 1812, only to die in the process. Or perhaps like John Brown, the white American who gave his life at the Battle of Harper’s Ferry trying to free the slaves. Maybe, like Tecumseh and Brown, he would sacrifice his life for a great cause someday. Maybe then his mother would treat him with the respect other kids got from their moms.

Oscar wished his father was alive and he could discuss his thoughts with him. But he had been just a baby when his father was killed and he knew him only from his framed black-and-white picture, in which he sat smiling at the photographer and seemed so happy to be wearing the dress uniform of the 48th Highlanders of Canada. The photograph hung in their house back on the reserve, beside one of Jacob wearing a similar uniform. Oscar often looked at that picture, trying to decide what sort of man his father had been. Lots of his father’s friends from the old days had told him stories of going hunting and fishing with him. How he used to run away laughing at the white game wardens when they tried to catch him. He was a throwback to the old Chippewas, they said, someone who could control his canoe in the most dangerous rapids, someone who was a crack shot, someone who never got lost in the bush, and someone who knew and respected the old ways. Everyone said he had a bad temper and once had got so mad at the Indian agent, whom he had caught trying to cheat the people, that he threw him down the stairs of the band office and broke one of his legs. The RCMP had hauled him up before a judge and he spent six months in jail.

Jacob told him his father had died a hero when the Canadian Corps launched an attack on the Germans entrenched on Hill 70 in northern France in August 1917. When he was old enough, Oscar checked out a history of the Great War from the library and read and reread the account of the battle until he practically had it memorized. Although he was proud of his father’s war record, he hated the Canadian government for sending him to his death and depriving him of a dad as he grew up. For as long as he could remember, he had wondered whether his father knew he was going to be killed when the picture was taken. Did he think of the newborn son he had never seen when he was dying? Did he regret he would never be able to take him fishing and hunting and do all the things fathers usually did with their sons? Was he sorry he would never be able to help his people before he died?

2

The train slowed to a crawl, moved across a bridge spanning the gorge over the Severn River, which flowed northwesterly out of Lake Couchiching into Georgian Bay, and climbed laboriously up a steep grade to enter the District of Muskoka. Twenty minutes later, Oscar and his grandfather were standing on the deserted platform at Muskoka Wharf Station as the sound of the train, with its load of passengers bound for Bracebridge and Huntsville and places farther north such as Timmins and the twin cities of Fort William and Port Arthur, faded away. Nearby, they could hear the groans of the steamers of the Muskoka Navigation Company rubbing their bumpers against government docks as they waited for the beginning of the tourist season and the arrival of day trippers from Toronto.

A minor official of the navigation company, a returned soldier who had served under Jacob in the war after he had been promoted on the battlefield to the rank of sergeant, had given his old army buddy permission to leave his canoe on the covered wharf over the winter. After confirming it had suffered no damage, Jacob and Oscar picked it up and slid it into the black water. They then took their positions, grandson in the bow and grandfather in the stern with their packsacks between them on the floor, and began their journey to the Indian Camp. There was no wind, but the ice had been off the lake for only a week; the night-time April temperature was well below freezing and each breath of air chilled their lungs. If all went well, they would be at their destination in six hours.

As Oscar paddled, the words and melodies of the hymns sung around the coffin earlier that night played over and over in his mind. At first he found them distracting, preventing him from concentrating on the things he wanted to think about on this special night on the water. But he soon gave in and sang aloud the words of his favourite hymn.

Shall we gather at the river,

Where bright angel-feet have trod,

With its crystal tide for ever,

Flowing by the throne of God.

Yes, we’ll gather at the river,

The beautiful, the beautiful river,

Gather with the saints at the river,

That flows by the throne of God.

On the margin of the river,

Washing up its silvery spray,

We will walk and worship ever,

All the happy, golden day.

As Oscar sang, tears of exultation flooded his eyes and he became conscious of the presence of someone, of something otherworldly, and he looked up at the stars and saw the outline of a smiling face. Old Mary, he recalled, had once said that the old people believed that humans were composed of three parts: a body that rots in the dirt after death; a shadow that watches over the grave of the corpse as well as the members of the dead person’s family and closest friends; and a soul that travels westward over the Milky Way to reside in the Land of the Spirits. The Land of the Spirits, she said, was ruled over by Nanibush, the right hand and messenger of the Creator, whose power ran through all things.

It’s Old Mary, he thought. Her shadow followed me here from the wake, and now her soul on its final journey is watching over me as I sing out here on the lake in the middle of the night. And the soul of my father, Oscar remembered, travelled on that same road to the Land of the Spirits after he was killed in France.

Oscar sang louder, shouting out the words of the hymn to the starlit sky.

3

Oscar’s passionate singing irritated Jacob, but he said nothing. If his grandson found some comfort from attending church and singing Christian hymns, good for him. Personally, he found their messages of love and forgiveness, if you were lucky enough to be counted among the chosen, hypocritical. His service in northern France as a soldier had led him to equate Christianity with cities in rubble, the suffering of civilians, and the massacre of soldiers. A lukewarm Christian before he went overseas, he had returned with a renewed attachment to the Indian beliefs he had embraced as a boy and abandoned as a man many years before. Like many other things in his life, he kept his beliefs to himself.

Puffing hard on his pipe, Jacob thought of the disrespect his daughter had shown to him and to Oscar at the wake. He was not angry — becoming upset would do no good — but he was worried about her. When he had come back from the war, neighbours on the reserve had told him that in the years he had been away, Stella did not seem to care for anyone or anything. She drank, she ran around with any low-class white man who took her fancy, often disappearing for weeks at a time, leaving her baby with Old Mary to look after. She would return smelling of alcohol, her hair a mess and her body covered in bruises when she had run out of money and needed to cash her pension cheques. She laughed too loud, they said, and she became involved in brawls whether she was sober or drunk. She was unpredictable; no one knew what would set her off. She was more than willing to take on anyone in a fight, man or woman, old or young, big or small, with fists, feet, and fingernails; a piece of cordwood would do if she was losing. She was, they said, just plain crazy.

Jacob suspected the neighbours might well be right. At the turn of the century, he and three other men from the Rama Reserve were working for two white men from Toronto, surveying the hunting and trapping territories of the Ojibwa people who lived on the headwaters of the Albany River, deep in the northwestern Ontario bush. One morning, a birchbark canoe paddled by a Native glided toward them out of the early morning mist.

“Bojo, Bojo,” the visitor, who spoke their language, called out to the men on the shore eating their breakfast. “Do you think the white men would give me work? I was born here and know the best fishing spots.”

The man was in his early sixties with a thick salt-and-pepper moustache, broad shoulders, a massive chest, and thick, powerful arms. He had taken the trouble, Jacob saw, to apply for work with his shoulder-length hair neatly cropped and he was dressed in what were probably his best clothes: black fedora, knee-high buckskin moccasins decorated with coloured beads and porcupine quills, a bandanna knotted around his neck, and a shirt loosely tucked into pants held in place by a red and white sash.

“We’re not here to fish. But come ashore and have something to eat with us and then I’ll go ask them if they can use you.”

“Tell him he can start right away,” the white men said when Jacob passed on the request. “We can use someone who knows the local landmarks.”

Jacob quickly made friends with the stranger, whose name was Caleb Loon, and passed the summer working alongside him by day and spending his evenings with him and his family. He enjoyed Caleb’s company and liked his wife, Betsy, a large, dark-skinned, heavy-set, good-humoured woman in her early thirties who was invariably dressed in a plain calico dress pulled over a pair of men’s pants and knee-high moccasins. He was happiest in the company of their daughter, Louisa, who was big-boned and tall like her mother and already a woman at the age of sixteen. She spent the evenings staring inscrutably into the fire as if she was thinking about matters so profound that she could never share them with anyone. While obviously too young for him, she was exactly the sort of girl he had always wanted to marry. Good looking when the flickering light of the campfire shone on her solemn face, she was, in his view, just like one of those unspoiled and unsullied Indian maidens who lived at the time of the ancestors.

Caleb and Betsy noticed Jacob’s interest in Louisa and questioned him closely about the life of his people in the south. They found it most interesting when he said most people owned their own houses on his reserve and spent their summers at the Indian Camp on the shore of a river in Muskoka where their kids swam and played in the water while their parents made good money selling handicraft and fish to rich white people. They were most attentive when he told them that he was still a bachelor at the age of thirty-seven.

“That’s not old,” Betsy said, smiling at Jacob. “I was only fifteen when I accepted Caleb’s marriage offer and changed my last name from Amick to Loon. And he’s thirty years my senior. It was the same with my parents. My father’s first wife had died and he was over fifty and my mother was sixteen when they got married. And it was a good marriage.”

By summer’s end, it was understood that Jacob would wed Louisa. The day after the first frost of the season, Betsy simply informed him that her daughter would marry him before they returned to their winter trapping grounds in the fall. Two weeks later, the members of the survey party ended their work for the season and returned to the railway station and from there by train to their homes in the south. Three weeks later, Louisa arrived at the railway station at the Rama Indian Reserve, and one week later she married Jacob.

It would not be a happy marriage. Jacob had mistaken damage for dignity and shyness. He would never discover that the decade Louisa had spent at residential school had crushed her spirit. From the age of six to sixteen, she had listened to teachers say that Indians had been godless savages before the arrival of the white man, and their ancestors, not having heard the Word of the Lord, were burning in Hell. She had been forbidden to speak her Indian language, her name had been replaced by a number, and she had been beaten by the nuns and sexually abused by the priests. She returned to her parents traumatized, having lost her culture and knowledge of life in the bush and knowing only a few words of Ojibwa. Her parents had been anxious to find a husband who could take care of her as soon as possible.

The summer after her marriage, Louisa gave birth to Stella in Jacob’s shack at the Indian Camp, and until her death six years later, she rejected her daughter. At first the other women thought she was just suffering with the sort of melancholy new mothers sometimes have after the birth of a baby but usually shake off after a few weeks. But when months, and then years went by, and Louisa continued to neglect Stella, they knew something was fundamentally wrong. And when she went to bed one day, turned her face to the wall, and starved herself to death, no one was really surprised.

When he came home from the war, therefore, and learned of his daughter’s erratic behaviour, Jacob concluded that she had probably inherited the mental illness that had cut short the life of her mother. He thus made allowances and tried to shield her from herself by chasing away predatory white men whenever he could. His protective instinct extended to her little boy, and he intervened when he found Stella beating him. She once threw Oscar outside naked into the snow, paying no attention to his screams, and it was just good luck that he happened to arrive home at that moment to bring his grandson inside.

When he told his daughter she had to change her ways, she just laughed at him. “I didn’t want that kid when he was born and I don’t want him now. If you love him so much, why don’t you just take him off my hands and raise him yourself.”

Jacob had sought to do just that, but it was not easy. He had no wife to help him, had no special parenting skills, and found it no easier to establish intimate ties with his grandson than he had with his own daughter. Perhaps that was the reason he made Oscar call him Jacob rather than grandpa or even grandfather. To make it worse, Stella was living in his house and it was heartbreaking to see her constantly shoving her little boy away when he was just trying to show her his love. He did what he could, making sure Oscar ate regularly and buying him decent clothes. When he was old enough, he sent him to the day school on the reserve where the white teachers, although hard on the kids, were at least teaching them some reading, writing, arithmetic, and other skills needed to survive in the white man’s world.

To shield him as much as he could from the influence of his mother, Jacob took Oscar out of the school on the reserve each spring when he started work at the guest house and let him attend classes at the school for white kids at Port Carling.

Oscar was now set to graduate from elementary school at the end of June, and since there was no high school on the reserve, he would have to leave at the end of the summer and attend a residential school until he was sixteen. And although his daughter had nothing good to say about the residential school she had gone to, maybe that was just because girls were more apt to become homesick than boys. Oscar would do okay.

4

A fierce wind from the northwest plains that had crossed Lake Huron and Georgian Bay and swept up and over the leafless highlands now came howling down onto the lake, whipping the water into rows upon rows of white-capped breakers that pushed the canoe off course. Oscar stopped singing as he and Jacob fought their way to a protected passageway between a large island and the shore.

For the next hour they paddled through a wide channel lined with oversized boathouses. Great steamer docks proudly adorned with sixty-foot-high flagpoles, their ropes rattling in the wind, protruded aggressively a hundred feet out into the water. Behind the docks, scarcely visible in the starlight, were wide walkways leading up past tennis courts and wide lawns to huge summer houses with upper-floor balconies and wraparound verandas. This was Millionaires’ Row, the preserve of the American and Canadian super-rich whose parents and grandparents had visited the district to hunt and fish in the late nineteenth century. It was still a land of poor bush farmers then and they were able to buy up the shorefront they needed at a cheap price to recreate the country-club life they enjoyed at home.

The waves were as high as ever when they left the shelter of the channel, but the wind was now at their backs and they began to make up for lost time. The cold, however, cut through Oscar’s clothes and his teeth began to chatter.

“Lie down on the floor and cover yourself with blanket,” Jacob told him. “I’ll wake you up when we reach the manido.”

Sometime later, a splash of cold water coming over the gunnels struck Oscar in the face. He woke up to see, in the grainy light of the predawn, the head of a blind chief emerging from the rock on the north-facing outcrop of a deserted island alongside that of a smaller inert guardian companion. As ancient as Turtle Island itself, its face was covered in lichen, its cheekbones were fractured and its nose broken. Inscrutable, it exuded profound sadness and complete indifference to the waves crashing against its base and to travellers who came to pay it homage. The old people said it was, in fact, the Creator himself in another form.

Taking hold of his paddle, Oscar held the canoe as steady as he could in the seething waters, freeing Jacob to light his pipe, and with his arms and hands outstretched, raise it into the air and offer a prayer to the unsmiling deity.

“Oh Great Manido, I beg you to protect two humble Chippewa canoeists from the wrath of the seven-headed water snake that dwells in the depths of this lake. I beseech you to allow us to travel in peace and safety to the Indian Camp. And bring us good luck, Oh Great Manido, as we try to catch a fish for our breakfast on this last leg of our journey.”

He then blew an offering of smoke to the statue and told his grandson to fish while he paddled. Oscar pulled the gear from a pack — an eight-inch silver spoon armed with triple gang hooks at the end of three hundred feet of thirty-pound test copper trolling wire — and fed it slowly into the water until it was only a few feet from the bottom. He gave the line a jerk, making the spoon leap forward, and a fish immediately took the bait. Oscar hauled in the line, hand over hand, keeping tension on the wire to keep it from breaking free. Jacob turned the bow of the canoe into the wind and held the boat steady until his grandson pulled the fish, a two-pound lake trout, over the side.

Jacob murmured a prayer of thanks to the Manido for answering his appeal and, clenching his pipe in his teeth, steered toward the mouth of the Indian River, a mile away. The final and most emotionally wrenching part of his journey was about to begin, for he was coming home to a place that no longer existed. He was coming home to Obagawanung, known as Indian Gardens by the first settlers. He had been born there in 1863, son of the chief and grandson of a veteran of the War of 1812 who had left the Rama Indian Reserve in the 1840s to look for a place where his family could live in peace away from the white man’s whiskey and religion. The veteran had found such a spot in the middle of the traditional hunting grounds of his people in a place so rocky and unfit for farming and with weather so harsh that he thought white men would never want to settle there. A dozen other war veterans and their families joined him and they built their village just below the rapids at the headwaters of the Indian River, six miles upstream from where it fed into Lake Muskoka.

5

Jacob had treasured Obagawanung when he was a child. It was a holy place where Mother Earth was most alive, where the people were part of the world around them, where the manidos were everywhere in the surrounding lakes and rivers and in the trees, the rocks, the animals, the fish, the clouds, the lightning, and the passing seasons. In the winters, he used go outside at night to listen to them whisper to each another in the mist that rose up from the current. In the spring, he would wait eagerly for the annual visit of the half-breed traders who came from their posts on Georgian Bay in birchbark canoes laden with guns, ammunition, and other supplies to exchange for beaver, muskrat, and wolf pelts. In the summers, he camped on an island in Lake Muskoka picking blueberries with his family, and in the autumns he went hunting with the men for deer and bear. He thought he would spend the rest of his life at Obagawanung, but one day when he was five or six, white men came and surveyed the lands, and the settlers arrived soon after.

Now, only half a dozen rotting log cabin homes, used as pigpens by the farmer son of one of the first settlers, remained of that world. With one exception, the graves of the inhabitants had been picked over by archaeologists seeking specimens of so-called primitive man to put on display in museums or ploughed into the ground by settlers years ago, leaving the shadows of the dead to wander without a home. The grave that was spared was that of Jacob’s grandfather, who had died of grief when told by the Indian agent that his people would have to abandon their homes to make way for the immigrants in search of land coming from across the Great Waters.

In bitter memories that he had shared only with his grandson, Jacob remembered, as if it were just yesterday, helping his father and the other men of the condemned community take his grandfather’s body one moonless night, when no white people were watching, and bury it at the mouth of the river at a secret place on a high point of land overlooking the Manido of the Lake. At that time, there had been no sign of human life anywhere in this part of Lake Muskoka. Now, six decades later, a gazebo had been constructed over the grave and shuttered summer cottages occupied building sites every two or three hundred feet along the indented and rocky shore.

Not long afterward, the police came with rifles and told the people they had to go, and they loaded whatever they could carry in their birchbark canoes and departed. Most would leave for a reserve on a rocky island on Georgian Bay and a life of poverty, but a few, including Jacob and his family, went to the Rama Indian Reserve seventy miles to the south where they had family to help them.

Jacob never forgot the white people standing on the shore cheering their expulsion, nor the huge piles of logs and brush burning on both sides of the river as they paddled away. His father told him the white people were making the point to the Chippewas that they could never return to their homes, that their time was over and that the time of the settlers had come. It was of little comfort to Jacob that the government later created a tiny reserve called the Indian Camp where his people could spend their summer months within the boundaries of the newly incorporated white village of Port Carling. If anything, it made him feel worse, since each time he paddled by the site of his former home he was assailed by thoughts of what his life might have been like if only the white people had shown his people some compassion.

6

An hour later, the sun was up, the wind had died down, and the ground was white with hoar frost. As they rounded a bend in the river, the two paddlers smelled wood smoke in the air and off in the distance they had their first view of Port Carling, a cluster of clapboard houses on both sides of the river, their windows framed with white-lace curtains and their backyards filled with chicken coops, privies, and half-empty woodsheds.

Twenty minutes later, they paddled past the Amick, a steam-powered supply boat owned by Jacob’s employer, James McCrum, moored to the government wharf. When the tourist season began, it would start its rounds delivering groceries, ice, and sundries to its well-off clients on the surrounding lakes. Up the hill, on the road leading off the bridge that spanned the Indian River, was the village business section, a row of one- and two-storey frame buildings with high false fronts to make them appear bigger than they were. On the other side of the bay, visible from the government wharf but cut off from the rest of the village by a ridge, were the two dozen one-room shacks of the Indian Camp where Oscar and his grandfather would spent the next six months.

A few minutes later, they pulled their canoe up onto the shore and Jacob took out a key to unlock the door to the shack he had built after he had married Louisa. The door, however, was ajar. Someone had entered over the winter months, but nothing, it seemed, had been stolen. The beds and mattresses, the linoleum-covered table pushed up against the window facing the lake, the chairs, the old cook stove, the pots and pans hanging from nails on the bare studs, the axe and saw, the woodbox, and the cutlery and crockery in the orange crates scavenged at the village dump and used as cupboards remained as they had been left the preceding fall. The smell of stale ashes, wood smoke, coal oil, and last year’s fried fish meals hung in the air. Sunlight streamed in through the windows devoid of curtains and blinds, but the building was cold and damp.

Oscar followed his grandfather into the shack and quickly checked his precious collection of books, bought with the money he had earned in past summers washing windows and sweeping walkways at nearby tourist cottages. His copies of the lives of Tecumseh and John Brown, and his illustrated copies of Swiss Family Robinson and Treasure Island were still there, he saw to his relief. So, too, were the two used volumes of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica and his collection of books written by veterans on the Great War. Nothing had been touched. He pulled from the woodbox a copy of the Toronto Star dated August 1, 1929, its fading headlines still proclaiming “Stock Market Crash, Dozens Jump to Their Deaths on Wall Street,” stuffed it into the stove, added dry kindling, and lit a fire.

Jacob returned to the canoe, retrieved the lake trout and cleaned and filleted it on the shore, tossing its guts to the seagulls that came swooping in, crying raucously to be fed. By the time he returned to the shack carrying the fillets, Oscar had unpacked the food supplies brought from the reserve and put the kettle on to boil. He picked up the heavy, fire-blackened cast iron frying pan that had been in the family for generations, placed it on the stove, scooped a big tablespoon of lard from its can, and spread it with his fingers over the cooking surface. While he was occupied with these tasks, Jacob rolled the fillets in flour and eased them into the lard that had started to boil and spit. Oscar quickly cut two boiled potatoes into slices and dropped them into the simmering mix. A short while later, grandfather and grandson, wearing their coats at the table, drank their tea and ate their breakfast in silence. Jacob then glanced at his pocket watch and left for the guest house, looking forward to meeting his friends from the village whom he had not seen since the previous fall.

“Don’t worry about making dinner,” he said as he went out the door, “I’ll pick up a few things at the store and I’ll see you when I get back from work.”

Oscar finished his meal, washed the dishes, and took a seat by the window. In a few minutes, he would trudge up the hill through the snow on the north-facing ridge and go down the sunlit slope on other side to the four-room combined elementary and high school, each with its separate entrance. The big boys from the high school would be standing just outside school property by the gate leading to their entrance, their shirt collars turned up against the cold. They would be shifting their weight from foot to foot, smoking roll-your-own cigarettes or chewing tobacco and spitting the wads on the ground as they waited for the bell to ring calling them to class. The big girls would already be inside their classrooms combing and brushing their hair, gossiping and organizing themselves for the day ahead.

In the playground of the elementary school, the girls would be skipping rope and chanting a rhyme they repeated endlessly at this time of the year.

Down by the river, down by the sea,

Johnny broke a bottle and blamed it on me.

I told ma, ma told pa,

Johnny got a spanking so ha ha ha.

The boys would be horsing around, playing marbles and kicking a soccer ball, but they would not invite Oscar to join in. He would go inside and ask the teacher if he could attend classes for the rest of term. The teacher would say yes, as he always did when Oscar appeared at his door at this time of year. He seemed to like Oscar, but, with a mocking smile never called him by his name, always addressing him as Chief. The kids called him Chief, as well, but never with a smile. To them, he was the outsider, even if most of them treated him with good-natured tolerance. Several others, big raw-boned members of an old pioneer family, however, called him a dirty Indian and had been bullying him for years. Once when he was a seven-year-old in grade two and fought back, they had ganged up on him, threw him to the ground, and pushed his face into the dirt.

“Say ‘I’m a dirty Indian,’” they said, “and we’ll let you go.” But Oscar refused to give in, and his tormentors yanked him to his feet, and, as two of them held his arms, a third pulled down his pants to show off his underwear.

“Wanna see this Redskin’s dick?” the older of the two asked the kids who had gathered around.

“I would,” Gloria Sunderland, the butcher-shop owner’s daughter said with a smirk. And after the big boys pulled down his underwear, Oscar ran back to the shack at the Indian Camp in tears to tell his grandfather what had happened. He expected Jacob would immediately go up to the school to tell those kids never to touch his grandson again or he would teach them a lesson they would never forget. And if their fathers got mad and came down to the Indian Camp to complain, his grandfather would pull their pants down to let them know how his grandson had felt when their sons had done that to him. After all, Jacob had killed Germans with his bare hands and was a war hero and had the medals to prove it. Dealing with the fathers of a couple of bullies in Port Carling shouldn’t be all that hard.

But his grandfather took him by the hand and led him to the shore and sat down with him on a piece of driftwood. “I have seen and learned a lot of things in my life,” he said. “To avoid torturing and poisoning myself with feelings of hatred, I banished from my heart the bitterness I once felt toward the people who expelled my people from Obagawanung. I discovered that the best way Indians can survive in the world of the white man is to fit in and wait for better days. I sent your mother to residential school so she would learn to fit in; I joined the army and fought the white man’s war so I would fit in; and to fit in today, I smile and say nothing when youngsters half my age call me Chief at the guest house. That’s why I think you should say nothing when the white children give you a hard time at school. Just remember: keep your heart free from anger, fit in, and wait for a better day and all will be well.”

Oscar would never forget his grandfather’s words, but as he grew older and listened to Old Mary’s stories about the deeds of the ancestors in past wars, and to the veterans talking in the evenings around the campfires at the Indian Camp about their exploits in the Great War, he grew more and more ashamed of his grandfather for not coming to his defence. If his father were alive, Oscar was sure that he wouldn’t have let anyone push his son around. And he vowed to get even, not just with the two white boys and Gloria Sunderland, but with everyone in the village, no matter how long it took.